Clearly, prevention is the best defense against this kind of assault. No existing or foreseeable economically viable skyscraper structure, they agreed, could have withstood this kind of cruel onslaught. Significantly, the panel stated that any mitigating reinforcements and redundancies added to these buildings could have only delayed the inevitable failure, though they would have bought more time for the evacuation of the occupants. Once high temperatures weakened the towers' supporting steel structures, it was only a matter of time until the mass of the stories above initiated a rapid-sequence "pancaking" phenomena in which floor after floor was instantly crushed and then sent into near free fall to the ground below. The main culprits in bringing the famously lofty buildings down, they concluded, were the two intensely hot infernos that erupted when tens of thousands of gallons of aviation fuel spilled from the doomed airliners. Their starkly sobering analyses highlighted the vulnerabilities of ultra-tall buildings to fire and pointed out steps that could be taken to lessen them.Īfter first describing the highly redundant structural system that kept the 110-story twin towers standing for decades despite hurricane-force winds and a terrorist truck bomb, the engineers then delineated how that system was breached and finally overcome on that fateful day when America was attacked. A panel of Boston area-based civil and structural engineers convened to discuss the fate of the superskyscrapers, struck by hijacked passenger planes, in front of an overflow audience on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The mechanisms by which these huge and seemingly solid edifices suddenly collapsed, snuffing out the lives of thousands, was the subject of a preliminary postmortem conducted last week in Cambridge, Mass. When New York City's giant World Trade Center towers plunged to earth following successive suicide terrorist attacks on September 11th, the world was confronted with one of most shockingand sickeningsights of modern times. BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Center seemed a permanent part of the Manhattan skyline.
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